Since she finds it too hard to post now, certainly won't ever talk about her feelings with anyone else, and because I know her in real life I feel I should post for her.

Cammy has been too depressed to work on the Amiga Christmas Tree website for the last couple of years. She's been scared off from the Amiga community by headstrong guys (trolls) who don't understand (or worse, they do understand and do it on purpose) how their skeptical, negative attitudes affect sensitive, creative people like Cammy, and by guys who became reliant on her selfless, helpful nature and worked her tirelessly having her solve their problems for them. She tried to help too much and never knew how to ask for help when she needed it herself, or how to say no to someone else who asked too much from her. She changed from this smart, inspirational girl into a dull, defeated wreck. She needed a break from all of this to give her time to heal. She's been doing a little better over the past couple of months, I know she's very happy about the recent Amiga game releases and really wishes she could have run the Amiga Christmas Tree site and game making competitions again, but she knows she can't handle it alone.

I know she really wished she could ask the guys who made games for the previous Christmas competitions if they'd like to bugfix, polish or add to their games and submit them to be published on a special Amiga Christmas CD which would run on CDTV, CD32 and any Amiga with a CD drive (or by mounting the ISO on any other Amiga). But she never got around to sending the prizes off to the first winners and just breaks down and gets too depressed any time she thinks about it. The prizes are still just sitting there in boxes, she only needs to contact the winners and ask for their current addresses and save up for a few weeks to pay the postage, but she's become too shy to even send private messages now. I know that she got really hurt by one of the winners who was annoyed at not having received his prize and requested that she send him a Sega Mega Drive instead, which she fretted about for months trying to figure out how she'd get one for him.

Okay so she sounds pretty pathetic, and I bet a lot of guys reading this are disgusted by her behaviour, but I'm afraid that's just part of the package with these lovely, creative girls. They're wonderful when they have some support, but they tend to take the weight of the world on their shoulders and get crushed by it. If she ever spills out her feelings it's met with "Don't be such a crybaby", which only hurts her more. And when she's depressed, her friends and everyone around her get depressed as well. Depressed people drag you down with them, it's like getting stuck in quicksand and it really sucks because nothing gets done.

What Cammy needs is people to converse with her, not tell her what to do. Try to be open to her ideas and hear her out, don't shut her down. I'm not referring to anyone in this thread, I know FOL has been a big help with hosting the site for her. She used to post on all the Amiga forums, and she hardly posts anywhere on the net any more because she doesn't feel welcome anywhere any more.